Heralded Aloha Pride cruise has a rough maiden voyage
Heralded Aloha Pride cruise has a rough maiden voyage
By Steve Hendrix
The Washington Post
October 10, 2004
"Twenty minutes?" cried a red-faced man at the hostess of the Palace Main Restaurant. "You said that an hour ago!" He was nearly shouting, and she looked close to tears as she bit her lip and glanced from her hopeless seating chart to the crowd of impatient, arms-crossed diners surrounding her.
The carping of cruise passengers is nearly a force of nature. Cruisers tend to be more emotionally invested in their travels than other tourists, and a little good-natured kvetching is as standard to ship life as lifeboat drills and trashy novels. But on the inaugural and subsequent voyages of Norwegian Cruise Line's Pride of Aloha, it hasn't been a little, and it hasn't been good-natured.
"I've heard more grumbling on this cruise than any one I've ever been on," said Don Derick, an alarm services dealer from Farmington, Conn., on the inaugural trip. He and his wife, Donna, have been taking yearly cruises since 1986, mostly on NCL ships.
"Some people are going way overboard with the complaining. But still, something's not right. There's a line for everything. They're running out of things like coffee and butter."
Maintenance, service issues
According to industry observers, the first two months of the newly refurbished Pride, which launched its seven-day inter-island Hawaiian service in July, has been one of the roughest cruise debuts in memory.
The long-awaited first U.S.-flagged and U.S.-staffed ocean-going cruise ship in nearly 50 years has been marked by reports of staterooms going uncleaned, hours-long waits for meals and overwhelmed workers deserting at every port.
"It was 10 hours before we could get our bathroom door open," said Jennifer Jopling of Plano, Texas, who with her husband, Doug, was on her third Hawaiian cruise, all with NCL. The Pride voyage, they said, cost three times what the previous one had.
"They kept telling us to use the public restrooms. We finally went down to reception and said we weren't leaving until someone came with us to open the door."
The final indignity for many passengers came at checkout, when those who hadn't read the fine print discovered the cruise line was charging them $10 a day per person -- $140 a trip for a couple -- as a mandatory service charge in lieu of some tipping (you were still expected to tip on bar orders and other transactions). Judging by the purple oratory echoing around the reception lobby, it was a touchy time to introduce a compulsory gratuity scheme.
Despite published reports that the charge was non-negotiable, NCL President and CEO Colin Veitch said in a phone interview that passengers who have brought complaints to the ship's attention and still feel they didn't get satisfaction may be able to get an adjustment in the 10 percent charge at checkout time.
"Agents on board the ship have that authority," Veitch said. And if you don't complain in advance? "We really want this to be an incentive for people to bring problems to our attention so we can address them," he said.
After weeks of seeming to downplay the problems -- and driving Internet cruise chatterers into a proper frenzy -- NCL went into emergency response mode. Letters of apology began appearing under cabin doors, and the company is offering former Pride passengers a 20 percent discount on a future NCL cruise. It has pledged to reimburse half of the mandatory service charge to those who have already sailed, and, for now, has suspended the policy for new cruisers.
"We've had teething problems," Veitch said. "But that's what they are. There's nothing fundamentally wrong with the product or the crew that we have."
He asserted that new training and hiring efforts are beginning to take hold.The root of the problem, he said, is the huge chore of building a crew from scratch. Unlike most start-ups, which draw fleetwide on experienced crew members from all over the world, the Pride of Aloha was obliged to hire green recruits from the United States alone. That was part of the deal when NCL won the right to loop between Oahu, Kauai, the Big Island and Maui week after week without ever touching an international port.
Hawaiian cruises tend to include such out-of-the-way stops as Ensenada, Mexico; Vancouver, Canada; and Fanning Island, a middle-of-nowhere atoll belonging to the Republic of Kiribati. That's because of a protectionist U.S. law known as the Jones Act, which prohibits any ship from running an all-U.S. itinerary unless it's American-flagged, American-built and American-staffed. That's usually too expensive to be profitable.
But NCL, having won some vital congressional wiggle room on the "American-built" part, is trying to make a go of it with American staffs on the 853-foot Pride of Aloha and two new ships scheduled to launch over the next two years.
Losing crew members
But in an industry where most employees come from Manila, Jakarta, Kingston and other low-wage labor pools -- workers willing to endure endless shifts and minuscule quarters -- building a crew from the likes of Honolulu, Los Angeles and New York has been tough. According to Veitch, the Pride has lost more than half its crew in the past three months, compared with an attrition rate closer to 20 percent a year in the rest of his fleet.
The ship leaves Honolulu every Sunday, making the short steam over to Kauai for two days, then on to the Big Island for separate overnight stops at Hilo and Kona, followed by two days on Maui before landing back in Honolulu the following Sunday. In all, the ship spends more than half of the trip tied up at one pier or another. It's all about going ashore.
NCL markets the shoreside events heavily -- passengers get a lush 130-page catalog of options, ranging from Kona coffee plantation tours to a rim walk around Maui's Haleakala crater to horseback trekking, ATV riding, snorkeling, diving, surfing, dolphin swimming, helicopter riding, sailing and shopping all over the four islands.
What's missing, on a ship that spends minimal amounts of time sailing, are such quintessential at-sea diversions as casinos, midnight buffets and nonstop bingo.
So, should you go? It depends. If waiting a half-day for your cabin to be ready would shatter your mood and a half-day of snorkeling in the Pacific wouldn't put it back together, then no. You may be better off waiting for this ship to mature or for its bigger, newer sister ships to arrive over the next two years.
Heralded Aloha Pride cruise has a rough maiden voyage
By Steve Hendrix
The Washington Post
October 10, 2004
"Twenty minutes?" cried a red-faced man at the hostess of the Palace Main Restaurant. "You said that an hour ago!" He was nearly shouting, and she looked close to tears as she bit her lip and glanced from her hopeless seating chart to the crowd of impatient, arms-crossed diners surrounding her.
The carping of cruise passengers is nearly a force of nature. Cruisers tend to be more emotionally invested in their travels than other tourists, and a little good-natured kvetching is as standard to ship life as lifeboat drills and trashy novels. But on the inaugural and subsequent voyages of Norwegian Cruise Line's Pride of Aloha, it hasn't been a little, and it hasn't been good-natured.
"I've heard more grumbling on this cruise than any one I've ever been on," said Don Derick, an alarm services dealer from Farmington, Conn., on the inaugural trip. He and his wife, Donna, have been taking yearly cruises since 1986, mostly on NCL ships.
"Some people are going way overboard with the complaining. But still, something's not right. There's a line for everything. They're running out of things like coffee and butter."
Maintenance, service issues
According to industry observers, the first two months of the newly refurbished Pride, which launched its seven-day inter-island Hawaiian service in July, has been one of the roughest cruise debuts in memory.
The long-awaited first U.S.-flagged and U.S.-staffed ocean-going cruise ship in nearly 50 years has been marked by reports of staterooms going uncleaned, hours-long waits for meals and overwhelmed workers deserting at every port.
"It was 10 hours before we could get our bathroom door open," said Jennifer Jopling of Plano, Texas, who with her husband, Doug, was on her third Hawaiian cruise, all with NCL. The Pride voyage, they said, cost three times what the previous one had.
"They kept telling us to use the public restrooms. We finally went down to reception and said we weren't leaving until someone came with us to open the door."
The final indignity for many passengers came at checkout, when those who hadn't read the fine print discovered the cruise line was charging them $10 a day per person -- $140 a trip for a couple -- as a mandatory service charge in lieu of some tipping (you were still expected to tip on bar orders and other transactions). Judging by the purple oratory echoing around the reception lobby, it was a touchy time to introduce a compulsory gratuity scheme.
Despite published reports that the charge was non-negotiable, NCL President and CEO Colin Veitch said in a phone interview that passengers who have brought complaints to the ship's attention and still feel they didn't get satisfaction may be able to get an adjustment in the 10 percent charge at checkout time.
"Agents on board the ship have that authority," Veitch said. And if you don't complain in advance? "We really want this to be an incentive for people to bring problems to our attention so we can address them," he said.
After weeks of seeming to downplay the problems -- and driving Internet cruise chatterers into a proper frenzy -- NCL went into emergency response mode. Letters of apology began appearing under cabin doors, and the company is offering former Pride passengers a 20 percent discount on a future NCL cruise. It has pledged to reimburse half of the mandatory service charge to those who have already sailed, and, for now, has suspended the policy for new cruisers.
"We've had teething problems," Veitch said. "But that's what they are. There's nothing fundamentally wrong with the product or the crew that we have."
He asserted that new training and hiring efforts are beginning to take hold.The root of the problem, he said, is the huge chore of building a crew from scratch. Unlike most start-ups, which draw fleetwide on experienced crew members from all over the world, the Pride of Aloha was obliged to hire green recruits from the United States alone. That was part of the deal when NCL won the right to loop between Oahu, Kauai, the Big Island and Maui week after week without ever touching an international port.
Hawaiian cruises tend to include such out-of-the-way stops as Ensenada, Mexico; Vancouver, Canada; and Fanning Island, a middle-of-nowhere atoll belonging to the Republic of Kiribati. That's because of a protectionist U.S. law known as the Jones Act, which prohibits any ship from running an all-U.S. itinerary unless it's American-flagged, American-built and American-staffed. That's usually too expensive to be profitable.
But NCL, having won some vital congressional wiggle room on the "American-built" part, is trying to make a go of it with American staffs on the 853-foot Pride of Aloha and two new ships scheduled to launch over the next two years.
Losing crew members
But in an industry where most employees come from Manila, Jakarta, Kingston and other low-wage labor pools -- workers willing to endure endless shifts and minuscule quarters -- building a crew from the likes of Honolulu, Los Angeles and New York has been tough. According to Veitch, the Pride has lost more than half its crew in the past three months, compared with an attrition rate closer to 20 percent a year in the rest of his fleet.
The ship leaves Honolulu every Sunday, making the short steam over to Kauai for two days, then on to the Big Island for separate overnight stops at Hilo and Kona, followed by two days on Maui before landing back in Honolulu the following Sunday. In all, the ship spends more than half of the trip tied up at one pier or another. It's all about going ashore.
NCL markets the shoreside events heavily -- passengers get a lush 130-page catalog of options, ranging from Kona coffee plantation tours to a rim walk around Maui's Haleakala crater to horseback trekking, ATV riding, snorkeling, diving, surfing, dolphin swimming, helicopter riding, sailing and shopping all over the four islands.
What's missing, on a ship that spends minimal amounts of time sailing, are such quintessential at-sea diversions as casinos, midnight buffets and nonstop bingo.
So, should you go? It depends. If waiting a half-day for your cabin to be ready would shatter your mood and a half-day of snorkeling in the Pacific wouldn't put it back together, then no. You may be better off waiting for this ship to mature or for its bigger, newer sister ships to arrive over the next two years.
posted by DP at 1:09 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
Links to this post:
Create a Link
<< Home